


saved a place for you

by starstrung



Category: The Martian (2015)
Genre: Gen, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-29 01:22:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5111207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starstrung/pseuds/starstrung
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It will be hundreds of days before he gets to see his family again. But he <i>will</i> get to see his family again, and he knows just how impossible that is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	saved a place for you

Mark’s first day aboard the _Hermes_ is a bit of a blur. He remembers getting cleaned up and eating (holy shit, _real food_ ). Then he makes the mistake of sitting down for a bit and all that adrenaline he was coasting on runs out. Out like a light.

It turns out twelve-g’s isn’t good for your internal organs. Or your ribs. Things tend to get a little crushed at that point.

As it is, he misses all the exciting action. Readjusting their course so they’re back on track for Earth, fixing some minor system damages (the kind that tend to happen when you _explode your own spaceship_ ), and convincing the guys back home that they really were okay, and that things were, for the first time in a year and a half, not a spectacular shitfest.

He’s kind of glad he sleeps through it all. He’s had enough of navigating through disasters to last him three lifetimes.

When consciousness finally creeps back to him, it takes him a while to get his bearings back.

Actually, the first thing he thinks when he comes to is, _Oh shit, I’m fucked. I’m fucking dead_. Because for the first time in a long while, he doesn’t smell like his own piss. His mouth doesn’t taste like dust and dead rat. His clothes are clean.

“You’re awake,” a voice says.

It’s Beck. Shadows under his eyes and emotion on his face that Mark can’t read right now, because it’s too much. He isn’t even able to speak. Beck doesn’t seem to mind. He squeezes Mark’s shoulder and grins into his neck, mindful of the ribs. Not that Mark gives a shit about his ribs right now.

There is _another human being_. In the _same room_ as him. After months of riddling its way out of Martian dust storms and impossible odds, Mark’s brain comes to a complete stop at this one simple fact.

There’s some yelling, and then running, and then there’s three _more_ human beings in the room with them. Martinez ends up doing most of the yelling because he’s piloting the ship through a minor course correction and he’s not allowed to leave the chair for at least another hour.

“How are you doing, man?” Martinez bellows from the bridge.

“I think I’m being attacked right now, but other than that, great!” Mark replies, voice slightly muffled by someone’s arm. He thinks Lewis might have hugged him. _Lewis_. Johanssen is being careful not to jostle him too much, but also at the same time, squeezing his hand and jumping up and down with it. Vogel grins down at him, eyes visibly wet, and then he swoops down and plants a kiss on Mark’s mouth.

“Oh my God,” Mark says. He turns to look at Beck through the throng of limbs that are enveloping him. “Aren’t you my doctor? Didn’t you take an oath?”

Beck takes pity on him. “All right, leave my patient alone. He needs rest.”

Laughing, they untangle themselves from him in stages. Suddenly, Mark begins to panic.

“Wait,” he says, voice a little higher than he meant it to be. He reaches out, and Johanssen, the closest one to him, reflexively takes his hand again.

“You don’t _all_ have to leave,” he says, trying not to sound pathetic about it.

Before they launched, NASA put them in isolation for ten days to evaluate the effect it would have on them. No contact with the outside world, not another human being for ten days. After he was finally let out, he hugged the first person he saw, who happened to be Mitch.

That was a walk in the fucking park. This is something else entirely.

He feels like he’s been knocked off his axis, fragile and unsettled. There’s nothing broken to fix, nothing that needs to be tested or planned out. There’s just him and his crew and the big, cavernous void that presses in on them. He tightens his grip on Johanssen’s hand.

“Sure,” Lewis says, voice soft. “Dr. Beck’s going to get some sleep, though. He’s been up for almost forty-eight hours patching you up, and he needs some rest.”

“But-,” Beck starts.

Lewis throws him a look. Mark has been on Mars for a long time, but he still remembers what it feels like to be on the receiving end of one of those.

Beck straightens up. “Yes, Commander.” He checks Mark’s vitals one last time and then leaves.

“Vogel and I can stay with him,” Johanssen volunteers. Vogel nods in agreement.

“All right,” Lewis says, “I’ll finish running the diagnostics on the reactor.”

“What do you need from us?” Vogel asks him when Lewis has left.

“Can you help me sit up?” Mark says.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Johanssen says, eyes glancing to the read-outs on Mark’s bio-sensors.

“Please,” he says, and she gives in, just like that. Getting coddled by the crew is probably going to get old real soon, but right now, he’s taking advantage of it. Vogel and Johanssen carefully help him upright. He doesn’t hesitate to lean heavily on them in the process, and when he’s finally sitting up on the sickbay cot, he doesn’t pull away.

He’s missed the sound of other people breathing. He closes his eyes and just listens to it for a bit.

“How are the kids?” he asks Vogel after a few minutes.

Vogel’s eyes twinkle, the way they always do when he gets to talk about his children. “They are doing fine. The oldest one is winning a lot of football matches,” he says, proudly.

“They must be missing their dad, huh?” he asks. It stuns him, that they have risked so much to come save him.

“Yes,” Vogel says. “But they are proud of what I chose to do.”

“None of us regret coming to save you, Mark,” Johanssen tells him.

“What if you’d all blown up into chunks and burnt up in the atmosphere? Would you maybe regret it a little bit then?” he jokes.

“Burning up in the Martian atmosphere?” Johanssen says, voice serious. “How many people can say that they’ve done that?”

Mark leans his head onto Vogel’s shoulder and doesn’t say anything else for a while.

-

After a while, it gets too painful to sit up. Vogel and Johanssen maneuver him so that he’s lying back down. They ask him if he wants more painkillers, but Mark doesn’t want to go to sleep. He’s worried that when he wakes up, he’ll forget that he’s been rescued again.

Mark has his head in Vogel’s lap. Vogel is slowly petting Mark’s hair, like he’s done this many times, although maybe not to a grown man. His kids are lucky to have a dad like him.

Johanssen is small enough that she’s managed to squeeze next to him in the cot. She props herself up on her elbows and tells him about everything that he’s missed. Mostly, it’s about her experiments. Mark doesn’t mind, even if he only understands every other word.

That’s how Martinez finds them, after he’s done with his work on the bridge. He pops into sickbay and stretches out a finger to poke Mark on his nose. “Contact with Watney, established.”

“As you can see his jokes have only gotten worse since you’ve been gone,” Johanssen says, rolling her eyes.

“You guys can’t do anything right without me, can you?” Mark sighs.

-

As soon as Mark is well enough to stand and walk around, they have him talking to people. He sends a message off to his parents the first chance he gets. That was rough. He’d needed the whole crew for that one, if just to hold him after he was done.

It will be hundreds of days before he gets to see his family again. But he will get to see his family again, and he knows just how impossible that is.

They make him send a statement for the press. He has to turn in his logs too. NASA is already working on how to make sure nothing like this ever happens again. Privately, Mark wonders if there will even be another Ares mission after the massive fuck-up this one was, but he appreciates the optimism.

He was still reluctant to turn in those logs, though. Considering how he made more than half of them under the assumption that they’d only be found years after his demise, it’s a bit embarrassing to know that people will actually be watching them. He makes a mental tally of how many times he cursed on camera, or danced along to Lewis’s embarrassing disco music. Yikes.

NASA wants him to answer a few questions for a psychologist too. For that, the crew has to leave the room.

He hates it.

-

He goes straight to the Rec room after he’s done, only to find a haphazard pile of blankets and mattresses on the floor.

“Um,” he says to the room in general.

“Figured it was better than having four people try to cram themselves on a small sickbay cot,” Beck says, which Mark can’t argue against. Martinez had tried to join them on the cot and it hadn’t gone well, to say the least.

Beck has decided to test out the pile by sprawling out on it, propped up on some pillows. There’s a laptop balanced in his stomach that he’s working on. Shadows still hang under his eyes, but he doesn’t look half-dead like he did before.

To his surprise, Lewis is there too, sitting cross-legged and drinking coffee.

“Get down here, Watney,” she says.

“Yes, ma’am,” Mark says, toeing off his shoes and folding to the floor.

She rewards him by passing over a mug of fresh coffee. He cradles it in his hands and breathes in the smell of it. “Oh sweet Jesus,” he says.

“Now you sound like Johanssen,” Lewis says, smiling into her mug.

“I will never give her shit about her coffee addiction ever again,” he says. Sweet, glorious coffee. He takes a sip of it, burning his tongue a little, but it’s worth it.

Beck looks up from his computer. “You’re giving him caffeine? The point of this was so that he could get some sleep.”

“Sleep isn’t important,” Mark says, taking a slightly more cautious sip. “Coffee. Coffee is what’s important.”

Beck watches him take a few more sips, a fond expression on his face, and then he confiscates his mug.

“Hey!”

“You can have coffee after you get some rest. Pick a side to sleep on,” he says, gesturing expansively. “The others had to finish up some work but they’ll be here soon.”

“Are you going to make me put up with Martinez’s snoring? Are you really that evil?” Mark asks.

 _You don’t have to do this for me_ , he doesn’t say. They’ve already done so much. None of the crew have said anything, but from the conversation he had with Vincent earlier, he gets the idea that Ares 3 was never actually _told_ to come get him.

Which means they mutinied. Words like “court-martial” don’t mean much out here in space, but he doubts it’ll feel the same way back on Earth. Guilt settles uncomfortably in his belly.

“Hey, Martinez was pretty upset that he didn’t get to spoon you while you recovered from your injuries,” Beck says. “Figured there was still time for that.”

“Can you sedate me for this, Doctor?” he asks.

Beck just laughs, that asshole.

Lewis still gets to drink her coffee, which Mark thinks is highly unfair. “You handled surviving on Mars. I think you can handle Martinez,” she says.

-

The rest of the crew join them, and they watch a movie on Beck’s computer. Something that was actually from _this_ century. Mark almost threw a USB stick into a Martian crater after weeks of nothing but old 90s movies. He might still be all choked up at how his crew risked life and limb to rescue him, but they have _atrocious_ taste in movies.

Mark ends up going to sleep quickly, having taken a few painkillers early that made him drowsy once they hit. He finds a comfortable position with lots of pillows and nods off half an hour into the film.

He’s not sure how much time is passed before he’s waking up, heart pounding. The usual nightmares. Skyrocketing carbon dioxide levels, a dust storm that doesn’t end, the MAV plummeting back to Mars right before achieving escape velocity. The more things Mark lives through, the more creative his subconscious gets in fabricating how it all could have wrong. He opens his eyes, trying to slow down his breathing.

Around him, the crew sleeps.

Beck is closest to him, laptop still open. It’s long since gone to sleep mode. Mark closes the lid and moves it to the side where no one will roll on top of it. Martinez, on his other side, makes a small noise of protest at being jostled. He’d kept his promise of spooning, and it turns out, his snores aren’t as loud as Mark remembers them to be.

More likely, sleeping through the sound of Martian winds has a way of changing one’s perspective.

As his eyes adjust to the dark, he finds the others. Johanssen, curled into a tight ball underneath some blankets. Vogel sleeps on his side, facing away. Lewis, on her back, arms folded. Even in sleep, she looks like she’s standing at attention.

The first few months alone on Mars had been the worst, in terms of seeing things that weren’t there (“hallucination” is such a _strong_ word). He had lost track of the times he thought he saw a lone figure in the distance, wearing an EVA suit, coming to get him.

This time, they’re real. He’s safe.

 

 


End file.
